I'm so glad you wrote about this. I wrote something about it a while back as well and I thought these quote were particularly interesting:
"What we know now is that early hominids weren’t covered in hair in the same way as our primate cousins and so women had to carry their babies who could not cling to their mothers as other primates do. The earliest stone tools are “scrapers” and “choppers” probably used for processing food and perhaps hides — not spears or other weapons for hunting or killing. Other early tools were likely to have been baskets or other storage containers for transporting both infants and foodstuffs.
An alternative evolutionary model has now been proposed by scientists like Nancy Tanner, Jane Lancaster, Lila Leibowitz, and Adrienne Zihlman. This alternative view is that the erect posture required for the freeing of hands was not linked to hunting but rather to the shift from foraging (or eating as one goes) to gathering and carrying food so it could be both shared and stored.
Moreover, the impetus for the development of our much larger and more efficient brain and its use to both make tools and more effectively process and share information was not the bonding between men required to kill. Rather, it was the bonding between mothers and children that is obviously required if human offspring are to survive. According to this theory, the first human-made artifacts were not weapons. Rather, they were containers to carry food (and infants) as well as tools used by mothers to soften plant food for their children, who needed both mother’s milk and solids to survive.
This theory is more congruent with the fact that primates, as well as the most primitive existing tribes, rely primarily on gathering rather than hunting. It also is congruent with the evidence that meat eating formed only a miniscule part of the diet of ancestral primates, hominids, and early humans. It is further supported by the fact that primates differ from birds and other species in that typically only mothers share food with their young. Among primates we also see the development of the first tools, not for killing, but for gathering and processing food.So, as Tanner writes of the still much earlier time that provided the foundation for the Old Society we have examined, “woman the gatherer,” rather than “man the hunter,” seems to have played a most critical role in the evolution of our species."
Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade . HarperOne. Kindle Edition.
The further data on women as hunters is certainly important but we also need to recognize that in most H/G tribes the bulk of the food comes from gathering, not hunting, which is an important but somewhat sporadically successful endeavor. Also, although most indigenous peoples have gender roles, they quite often aren't all that adhered to - it's not remotely like patriarchal concepts of them.
